Facebook has announced to open up a new AI research lab in Montreal that will create more than 100 jobs for scientists across different locations. The team of scientist will be led by the renowned Professor Joelle Pineau, co-director of the Reasoning and Learning Lab at McGill University and will be working on a wide range of ambitious AI research projects with special focus on reinforcement learning and dialog systems. While maintaining her academic position at McGill University, Dr. Pineau previous research had focused on developing new algorithms for planning, learning and applying them to complex problems in robotics, health care, games and conversational agents.

Facebook AI Research (FAIR) Montreal will engage with publications, open source software, participation in technical conferences, workshops and research collaborations. FAIR also plans to partner with Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), McGill University, and Université de Montréal in the near future. Facebook chose Montreal as it has an academic AI community, exciting startup ecosystem and promising government policies that encourage AI research.